by Steven Sora
When white Europeans traveled across the Atlantic they may have impressed the Micmacs with the trappings of a higher civilization. Because he had been told by the Faeroese fisherman that his life was spared when he taught the natives how to fish with a net, Sinclair always brought them trinkets, as would later explorers. The trappings of civilization were regarded very highly. As mentioned earlier, the Micmacs have a legend of a prince who came to their world on the backs of whales. He brought with him many men and taught them how to fish with nets. The prince also gave them a magical instrument that made music, a flute. And he showed to them his “sword of sharpness.”35
Silas Tertius Rand was a missionary and a student of languages who lived among the Micmac people in the mid-1800s. He could speak Greek, Latin, and Hebrew as well as his own English language, and eventually he learned Micmac, Mohawk, and Maliseet. He is responsible for recording most of what we know about the Micmac language. He translates the name of the prince who brought civilization to the Micmac as “Glooskap.” Frederick Pohl identifies Glooskap as Sinclair and also points out that Rand’s recordings of Micmac songs were actually very similar to Scottish sailing songs.
Glooskap literally means “deceiver,” but this was in fact a title that conveyed respect among northern Atlantic peoples on both sides of the ocean. The Norse god Loki was the trickster god who, like the Greek Prometheus, stole the fire from the gods and gave it to ordinary people. This legend of fire-stealing is shared by many and points to the contact between Stone Age people and more civilized people. Glooskap had the knowledge to make fire. When ancient peoples started a fire, they would keep it lit for as long as possible, since they might not be able to start another one. The Micmac regarded Sinclair as “wasteful” because he put his fire out at night.
According to the Micmacs, Glooskap built a town, which Sinclair told Zeno that he intended to do. This settlement may have been in a place the Micmacs called Piktook, now Pictou. This was a center for the Micmac people, and when the Europeans came to stay, it was a center for them as well. From his first meeting, Sinclair-Glooskap was welcomed as an important chief by the natives. Legend painted him in mythical proportions, but more down-to-earth tales have the chief eating, drinking, and sleeping among his Micmac friends. He taught them games that are similar to existing Scottish children’s games. He also taught them new words and learned a few of theirs.
From his camp in Piktook he went exploring. His travels are recorded by the Micmacs as having started in the Minas Basin area and then crossing a narrow point of the Bay of Fundy to the Parrsboro area and heading west to Cape d’Or. In this area, in a small harbor now known as Advocate Bay, Sinclair may have built additional ships to replace those that sailed back to Europe with Zeno. In 1957 Pohl explored the region closely for clues but found that most of the area had been mined and bulldozed for roads. According to the Micmac tale, Sinclair-Glooskap then left this promontory and headed due west to the ocean. The real Sinclair, if he had sailed west from this point, would have reached New Brunswick, Maine, and then Massachusetts and Rhode Island. From Rhode Island or Massachusetts, the current would take him to Nova Scotia again, and later that current would take him back across the Atlantic and home to Scotland.
The longer Sinclair stayed, the more likely it is that his men might have married among the native peoples he visited. Children born to such a marriage may have been prized and honored if the first European–North American contact was friendly. The Micmacs belong to the Wabanaki tribe. The Wabanaki, in turn, are a branch of the Algonquin group, a confederation of languages more than an alliance of tribes. Wabanaki means “People of the Dawn”—the word dawn signifying “east,” the place from which the sun rises every morning. A closely related tribe is the Wampanoag, their tribal name refers to them literally as the “white people.” Being a descendant of the white people who landed in their world may have been considered an honor, and a person of the “white people” therefore might have been of partly European extraction. The presence of the “skeleton in armor” of Fall River, Massachusetts, might indicate that a Sinclair soldier stayed among the “white people” tribe and married into their clan.
The Gaelic word for woman is ban, and in certain dialects of the Algonquin language the word for woman is bhanem.36 It is interesting to note that a type of baked bread was called bannock by both the Scottish and the Abenaki branch of the Micmac. Algonquin women had a special name for their babies who were still being breast-fed—papoose or papisse. Our own English pap refers to breast, and a woman’s breast provides pablum for her baby’s nourishment.
The Micmac did not regard Glooskap as their most supreme god; this god was Mn’tu, pronounced and often spelled Manitou. Celtic sailors brought their gods with them, the most important of whom was their god of the seas, Manannan. The Celtic sailors navigated by the constellations, including the Great Bear, which we know alternately as Ursa Major. Silas Rand and Cotton Mather found that the Micmac and Natick (of Massachusetts) both called the same constellation by the same name. The Milky Way of the European sailors was called the Milky Road by the Micmacs.
Places on Earth, too, had names with similar meanings. A sacred waterfall in Maine is Penobscot, and the tribe that took its name from this waterfall called their village Pennacook, meaning “down the hill.” The British and Scottish surname Pennycook similarly describes people who lived “down the hill.” The “oc,” “ock,” and “ook” word endings in Native American dialects often mean “hill” or “place.” In Scotland hill is uck in the highland and ook in the lowland dialects. In Ireland knock and cnoc also means “hill.” Gaelic Mor-riomach means “from the deep place.” In Algonquin, the river still remembered as the Merrimack in New Hampshire means “deep fishing place.” The Scottish clan of Morrison debates the origin of their name. Both sides of the debate acknowledge it means “Sons of the Deep,” and both sides agree it signifies people who arrived in Scotland because of a shipwreck. They disagree only about whether they had originally sailed from Ireland or Scandinavia.
The New Hampshire river that remains on our map under its Algonquin name of Merrimack has a second name at the place where its width is the greatest—Kaskaashadi, or “slow moving waters.” In Gaelic, G-uisge-siadi has the same meaning. Another river in New Hampshire is called the Quechee, meaning “gorge” in the native language; the word resembles cuithe the Gaelic term for “gorge.” Similarly, the rivers Piscataqua, Seminenal, Amoskeag, and Cabassauk as well as the brook named Cohas have related meanings in Gaelic.
The Iroquois were a very powerful confederation of tribes that lived west and south of the Algonquin. Was their organization, which brought them power, the result of early contact with those other European visitors, the Norse? As previously mentioned, the long halls that were favored by the fierce Vikings were similar to the longhouses of the Iroquois, which made them unique among native tribes.37 The Iroquois word for “stones” is ariesta, which is also their word for “testicles.” The Norse, too, called both stones and testicles by the same name—eista. The Norse word for “eat” is eta, and the Iroquois word is ate. The Norse word for “ice” is iss, the Iroquois word is oise. The Norse word for “woman” is kvenna (which later gave us our word for the female ruler, queen), also known as kona. In the Iroquois language wakonnyh, akonkwa, and iskwe are all words for “woman.”
The multitude of shared terminology on both sides of the Atlantic is certainly a significant clue that points to early commnication between these groups. How much of that interaction was a result of Gaelic seafarers, Norse Vikings, or Sinclair’s hardy Scots is not as important as the fact that such communication existed in the first place. What is also important is that it is very likely that contact was relatively constant for a period of time that may stretch back one thousand years before Columbus. The steadfast refusal by some to accept that Faeroese whalers, Basque fishermen, Norse farmers, and Irish monks reached the western shores of the Atlantic before Columbus paints them into a corner. The North
Atlantic was crossed by sailors well before Columbus. The Sinclair-Zeno voyage was just one more of those many pre-Columbian crossings. It is also the first step in the construction of the Money Pit at Oak Island. Future Sinclairs would be back in the years to come. The newfound Arcadia held a greater significance for them than simply new lands. It became a sanctuary and a hiding place for a family with the need for such a refuge.
Chapter 5
“ … IF TWO OF THEM ARE DEAD”
There is a saying that “three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.” If Henry Sinclair felt that he had discovered a New World, he decided to keep his world a secret. He had just enough time to pass on the knowledge of his new lands to his family before conflict with England took the life of the “prince” of the New World. He never had had a chance to see his settlements grow, since he died defending his lands in the north. His son, Henry, the second earl of Orkney, was chief attendant to Prince James, who later became James I of Scotland.1 On a mission to France he was captured at sea and sent to the Tower in London. He was later released and spent his last days on the family estates in Scotland. Henry had time to pass on the knowledge of the New World to his own son, William, the grandson of the first earl, who was singularly responsible for preserving and defending the sacred treasures that were to come to Oak Island.
There were two other principals in the 1398 expedition—Sir James Gunn and Antonio Zeno. Sir James Gunn was left in a shallow grave in Massachusetts and shared the secrets of the new lands with no one. His Orkney crew may have already included sailors who were as well traveled as the Faeroese fisherman, but for such commoners the new lands held no riches beyond those of good fishing. There is reason to believe that the Zeno family did not see the value in lands to the west of Iceland. New lands were not needed at the time. The year in which Zeno returned to Venice was the tail end of the plague. This plague hit Italy even harder than it hit remote Iceland, possibly killing two-thirds of the population. New lands in the icy waters of the North Atlantic held little value. Antonio himself died in 1405, just months after returning to his home in Venice.2
Andrew Sinclair’s family biography, The Sword and the Grail, takes the stance that the Sinclair-Zeno expedition had been a “secret mission” all along, but there is no evidence to support this claim.3 The expedition was mostly simply an adventure, embarked upon for the thrills and possibilities, in the spirit of all adventures. Evidence that the two families had known of each other three hundred years earlier, when the crusaders traveled to Jerusalem on Venetian ships, is circumstantial, but it does not mean that they had any more than a shared event in their respective family histories.
The Zeno family did not keep the voyage secret; they simply had no reason to publicize it in light of the fact that there is evidence that these lands were not “new” at all. Visits to Iceland were not uncommon in Zeno’s day. As we have seen, the pope in Rome had sent bishops to Iceland and Greenland, and Columbus had sailed to Iceland in 1477. And two thousand years before Zeno or Columbus, the intrepid Greek sailor and astronomer Pytheas had sailed to “Thule.”4 Discovery of the Zeno voyage was not considered significant until much later, when European countries began to fight over the lands discovered by accident while trying to find a sea route to China. By the time Zeno’s letters and charts emerged, the Old World was squabbling over the territory in the New World.
In 1558, a descendant of the two seafaring Zeno brothers who had sailed with Sinclair compiled the letters the brothers had sent home—Niccolo’s letters to Antonio asking him to come to Scotland and those that both brothers wrote to Carlo in Venice. A great-great-great grandson, who was also named Niccolo, is responsible for compiling the letters. As a youth, this younger Niccolo Zeno had been playing in a storage area in the palace of the Zeno family when he came across the letters and maps. The five-year-old child destroyed much of what was there. Later, when he discovered that his father had shown the letters to a relative who was planning to include them in his publication Discendenza Patrizie, he realized his folly.5 As an adult he came across the papers again and preserved the remainder.
The letters and charts that had survived Niccolo’s childhood were in poor condition, and in many cases Niccolo copied the letters and maps in his own hand. What was not understood he updated, and anything that translated poorly from century-old language was edited. When details appeared to be missing, he added his own. And he superimposed the lines of longitude and latitude to the map.6 It is no surprise that some of the detail, including place-names and names of individuals, suffered in the translation. As a result, we will never know just who is responsible for the inaccuracies of the maps and manuscripts.
In 1558 the claim of the authenticity of the letters might have been debated at a time when the question of just who first landed where started to take on monumental significance. Before lands were colonized, conflicting claims led to continuing challenges. Resolution by the authority of the pope resulted in the “Papal line of Demarkation,” which so inaccurately divided the world between Spain and Portugal that it failed as a solution to the growing conflict.7 The English, French, and Swedes were soon to start pressing their claims to every square mile of North America, barren or otherwise.
During Antonio Zeno’s lifetime, new lands were not needed in a de-populated Europe. Once the plague ended, however, open space, farmlands, and the ever present possibility of gold and silver drew great attention to America. The same farflung outposts of eastern Canada that had been abandoned a hundred years earlier became the reason for life and death struggles between European nations. A claim from any Giovanni-come-lately would be ridiculed as just a counterfeit effort to take lands that one had no realistic reason to claim. Because the tiny city-state of Venice would never make any such claim, sixteenth-century mapmakers put much greater stock in the Zeno voyage than historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mariners and cartographers snapped up copies of the Zeno map, which soon circulated widely throughout Europe.
Gerardus Mercator, whose Mercator projection is familiar to every student of modern mapmaking, was a German who Latinized his name, as was the custom for scholars of the day. He studied cartography at university, but took his science into the commercial arena immediately upon graduation. His career was launched selling maps of the Holy Lands to the religious minded. Upon inventing his technique, which is still used today, he redrew the map of the world, again employing both his genius for science and his talent for commerce. He called his new world map a “New and Improved … Description of the World,” creating a marketing slogan that would be employed by advertisers four hundred years later.8
His map showed a gigantic Australia, originally extrapolated from Greek maps. It also increased the size of all lands that lie near the poles, which could create confusion for less-educated seafarers. His maps depicted “St. Brendan’s Isle” and a “Brazil” situated in the North Atlantic, directly west from Ireland. Mapmakers of his day seemingly would rather add an island that wasn’t there rather than miss an island that was. Abraham Ortelius was a friend of Mercator’s from Antwerp and also used the Zeno map along with more ancient sources for his own maps.9 With Mercator, Ortelius is given the credit for creating the first atlas.
That there may have been inaccuracies, either in the original or in the copied version of the Zeno charts, does not discredit the Zeno voyage any more than the fact that Cabot labeled North America as Cipangu (Japan) discredits his voyage.10 Much of what earlier was considered inaccurate has been confirmed by modern experts, including Hapgood and Mallery, especially the detailed description of the Greenland coastline and points farther west.
The Zenos are well-known to history both for their wealth and their long-term prominence in their home city-state of Venice. During the sixteenth century Venice was possibly the wealthiest city in the world because all commerce with Asia was overland on a route that passed through the city. Such trade produced great wealth, and the palace of Zeno was a center of Venice’s
power. The history of the Zeno family stretched back into European history one thousand years.11 They started in Padua and became one of the first twenty-four families who built Venice in the eighth century. They were among the greatest fleet owners of Venice, a center for seabound commerce. Their ships traveled from the cities of Europe to Constantinople, to the Levant. The Roman Church and the Catholic kings were required to pay the Zeno fleets for passage to Constantinople and eventually to Jerusalem. The Zeno family was represented on the Council of Ten, which had run Venice since the fourteenth century.
Twice the family received credit for the survival of their city-state—first in 1253, when Renier Zeno brought financial life back to a Venice wracked by revolts that had hurt trade. His diplomacy put an end to the struggles and reestablished the commercial primacy of Venice. His fleet defeated the Genoese fleet in their trade war for the Levant, and he was rewarded with the title of doge. While being the doge of Venice might be compared to being mayor of a great city, Venice was the richest city and the doge was entitled to make the rules governing world trade and to benefit from them. When this first Zeno saved his city, the real reward was riches, and when he died the fortune he left behind was vast.
The second rescue of Venice by the Zeno family was in 1380. At that time Venice was still the strongest principality in a divided Italy as well as the heart of the world’s trade linking the East and West. Everything that came overland passed through Venice, where a fee, sometimes one-third of the entire value of the goods, would be charged. Such a monopoly on world trade attracted the jealousy of other states that lived in the shadow of Venice. Two of Venice’s enemies, Padua and Genoa, teamed up with Hungary against Venice. The early conflict started badly for the outmanned city, and the Genoese fleet captured and occupied Chioggia on the lagoon of Venice and prepared to take the entire city. There were two fleets of importance in Venice at the time. The fleet commanded by Vittor Pisani was defeated by Genoa. The second fleet was under the command of Carlo Zeno.
